Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Resumo

Devil in the Grove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, is a gripping true story of racism, murder, rape, and the law. It brings to light one of the most dramatic court cases in American history, and offers a rare and revealing portrait of Thurgood Marshall that the world has never seen before.

As Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns did for the story of America’s black migration, Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove does for this great untold story of American legal history, a dangerous and uncertain case from the days immediately before Brown v. Board of Education in which the young civil rights attorney Marshall risked his life to defend a boy slated for the electric chair—saving him, against all odds, from being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit.

PROLOGUE

ALL HIS LIFE, it seemed, he’d been staring out the windows of trains rumbling toward the unknown. Again, he was seated in the Jim Crow coach, hitched directly behind the engines, where the heavy heat bore the smell of diesel. Still, the lawyer sat proud in his smart double-breasted suit, a freshly pressed handkerchief dancing out of his pocket, as the haunting Southern landscape of cypress swamps, cotton fields, and whitewashed, tin-roofed shanties flickered by. Traveling alone, he hunched his six-foot, two-inch frame over case files; a cigarette dangling from his lips, he scribbled some notes on a yellow legal pad. He would rewrite the draft before he typed it up later; he worked meticulously. A federal clerk once told him that with just one look at the smudges or erasures on a lawyer’s pleading he’d know if it was written by a white man or a Negro. It was a remark Thurgood Marshall never forgot. In cases like his there was too much at stake for him to be filing any nigger briefs.

The trains he rode bore grand names like the Orange Blossom Special, the Silver Meteor, and the Champion, and their rhythms ran in Marshall’s Baltimore blood. Both his father, Willie, and his uncle, Fearless, had been porters on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and to help pay for college, young Thurgood himself had worked as a waiter in a B&O dining car. The railroads were for him and his family a source of pride, and status, but on trips like these, when he was riding alone, they also summoned in Marshall an old sadness. His wife, Buster, unable to bear the children he had longed for, had one year for his birthday given him the electric train set she had hoped someday to present to her husband and their son. With the train, and with an engineer’s hat perched atop his head, Marshall entertained the boys in their Harlem apartment building instead.

By the mid-1940s, Marshall, the grandson of a mixed-race slave named Thorney Good Marshall, was engineering the greatest social transformation in America since the Reconstruction era. He had already devoted more than a decade of his career to overcoming the inherent defects of a Constitution that had allowed, by law, social injustices against blacks, who had been denied not only the right to vote but also equal rights and opportunities in education, housing, and employment. With his far-reaching triumphs in landmark cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall would indeed redefine justice in a multiracial nation and become, as one civil rights pioneer described him, the Founding Father of the New America.

Before achieving those victories, however, Marshall fought countless battles for human rights in stifling antebellum courthouses where white supremacy ruled. Neither judges nor juries in the Jim Crow South had much interest in Marshall’s nuanced constitutional arguments. To Marshall, the representation of powerless blacks falsely accused of capital crimes became his opportunity to prove that equality in courtrooms was every bit as vital to the American model of democracy as was the fight for equality in classrooms and in voting booths.

On Marshall’s journeys, when the moon lit the passing landscapes of the South, he customarily drank bourbon, and he enjoyed the company of the night porters—they’d joke and talk together in segregated cars atop suitcases and the occasional casket. Or, sitting in the coach car, Marshall would drift in and out of sleep to the lullaby of the locomotive, its plaintive cry announcing every crossing as it rolled onward, southward, closer and closer to benighted towns billeting hostile prosecutors, malicious police, and the Ku Klux Klan. In the rhythm of the rails came the whipping of the wind as again the dream descended on him, and in the wind the massive black flag unfurled outside the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and as a pall fell over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, he read again the message, in stark white letters on the flag’s flapping black field: A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.

The photographs were always horrifying: shirtless black victims, their bodies bloodied, eyes bulging from their sockets. Of all the lynching photos Marshall had seen, though, it was the image of Rubin Stacy strung up by his neck on a Florida pine tree that haunted him most when he traveled at night into the South. It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body, that caused Marshall, drenched now in sweat, to stir in his sleep. It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race. I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice, Marshall said of the dream.

Seventeen-year-old Norma Lee Padgett had that look—chin held high, lips pursed—when in her best dress she slowly rose from the witness box to identify for the jury the three Groveland, Florida, boys whom she had accused of rape. Like the sworn truth of the fictitious Mayella Ewell, the white teenage accuser in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Norma Lee’s dramatic testimony against the Groveland Boys tore a county apart. Her pale index finger extended, it dipped from boy to boy as she spoke out each name, like a young schoolteacher counting heads in class, and her breathy cadence sent a chill through the courtroom.

And like Harper Lee’s heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, Thurgood Marshall found himself at the center of a firestorm. It would bring the National Guard to Lake County, Florida, where mob violence drove hundreds of blacks from their lives in Groveland, and in the aftermath it would prompt four sensational murders of innocents, among them a prominent NAACP executive. Despite the fact that Marshall brought the Groveland case before the U.S. Supreme Court, it is barely mentioned in civil rights history, law texts, or the many biographies of Thurgood Marshall. Nonetheless, there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story. The case was key to Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer, willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials, and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes—even if it killed him. And Groveland nearly did.

By the fall of 1951, Marshall had already filed and had begun trying in lower courts what would become his most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education, when he was again riding the rails toward Groveland. It was on such a journey to the South that one of Marshall’s colleagues noticed the battle fatigue setting in on the lawyer. You know, Marshall said to him, sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul. Battling personal demons as well as the devils who brought bullets, dynamite, and nitroglycerin into the Groveland fray, the lawyer saw death all around him in central Florida. So intense did the violence in Groveland become that on one of Marshall’s visits, J. Edgar Hoover insisted that FBI agents provide the NAACP attorney with around-the-clock protection. Usually, though, Marshall negotiated Florida alone, despite the number of death threats he daily received.

A fellow NAACP lawyer thought of Marshall as a suicidal crusader, because he involved himself in such explosive criminal cases in the South at an exceptionally crucial time in the history of the blacks’ struggle for equal opportunity. Suicidal or not, Marshall was unquestionably irreplaceable in the mission of the burgeoning civil rights movement. And Marshall’s colleague too got swept up in the enthusiasm and commitment. Thurgood says he needs me, the NAACP associate told his wife. If he needs me, I’m going. If I get killed, I get killed. But I gotta be on that train. . . .

Marshall would later say, There is very little truth in the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality. Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil. Thurgood Marshall might never have spoken those words if he hadn’t defended the Groveland Boys. The case made a lasting impact on both him and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. It also became the impetus behind the NAACP’s capital punishment program, which eventually led to the Supreme Court ruling that capital punishment was unconstitutional as well as to the Court’s later decision to invalidate the death penalty for rape.

The victories came only after many train rides to towns where no hotels or restaurants accommodated people of Marshall’s race. Local blacks would welcome him, though, with hospitality and tears of gratitude. They’d clean their houses spotless for his stays. He’d join his hosts at their dinner tables and tell them stories from his travels that brought laughter to the night. He’d eat their modest offerings of salt pork and poke salad with such aplomb you’d think he was dining on his favorite she-crab soup over drinks with friends back in Harlem. The women would have lunches packed and delivered to him at court each day. Broken-down cars would get glued together to taxi him back and forth. Later in the day, word would spread: Men are needed to sit up all night with a sick friend. You’d hear it whispered everywhere. They’d all know what it meant. They were lining up armed guards to keep Marshall safe from night-riding Klansmen while he slept.

Alice Stovall, Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP, recalled the effect Marshall had on blacks when he showed up at courthouses in small Southern towns. They came in their jalopy cars and their overalls, she recounted. "All they wanted to do—if they could—was just touch him, just touch him, Lawyer Marshall, as if he were a god. These poor people who had come miles to be there."

Southern juries might be stacked against blacks, and the judges might be biased, but Thurgood Marshall was demonstrating in case after case that their word was not the last, that in the U.S. Supreme Court the injustice in their decisions and verdicts could be reversed. He was a lawyer that a white man would listen to and a black man could trust. No wonder that across the South, in their darkest, most demoralizing hours, when falsely accused men sat in jails, when women and children stood before the ashy ruins of mob-torched homes, the spirits of black citizens would be lifted with two words whispered in defiance and hope:

Thurgood’s coming.

1 MINK SLIDE

Interior of the Morton Funeral Home, Columbia, Tennessee, showing vandalism of the race riots in February 1946. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

November 18, 1946

IF THAT SON of a bitch contradicts me again, I’m going to wrap a chair around his goddamned head."

One acquittal after another had left Tennessee district attorney general Paul F. Bumpus shaking his head in frustration over the NAACP lawyers, and now Thurgood Marshall was hoping to free the last of the twenty-five blacks accused of rioting and attempted murder of police in Columbia, Tennessee. The sun had been down for hours, and the start of a cool, dark night had settled over the poolrooms, barbershops, and soda fountains on East Eighth Street in the area known as the Bottom, the rickety, black side of Columbia, where, nine months earlier, the terror had begun. Just blocks away, on the news that a verdict had been reached, the lawyers were settling back into their chairs, fretfully waiting for the twelve white men on the jury to return to the Maury County courtroom. They’d been deliberating for little more than an hour, but the lead counsel for the defense, Thurgood Marshall, looked over his shoulder and knew immediately that something wasn’t right. Throughout the proceedings of the Columbia Race Riot trials, the spit-spangled courtrooms had been packed with tobacco-chewing Tennesseans who had come to see justice meted out. But the overall-clad spectators were equally intrigued by Marshall and his fellow NAACP lawyers: by the strange sight of those niggers up there wearing coats and talking back to the judge just like they were white men.

Marshall was struck by the eeriness of the quiet, nearly deserted courtroom. The prosecution’s table had been aflutter with the activity of lawyers and assistants throughout the trial, but none of them had returned for the verdict. Only the smooth-talking Bumpus had come back. All summer long he’d carried himself with the confidence that his Negro lawyer opponents were no match for him intellectually. But by relentlessly attacking the state’s case in a cool, methodical manner, Marshall and his associates had worn Bumpus down, and had already won acquittals for twenty-three of the black men on trial. The verdicts were stunning, and because the national press had defined the riots as the first major racial confrontation following World War II, Bumpus was no longer facing the prospect of humiliation just in his home county. The nation was watching and he had begun to unravel in the courtroom, becoming more frustrated, sarcastic, and mean-spirited as the trial progressed.

Lose your head, lose your case, was the phrase Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, had drilled into him in law school. Marshall could tell that his adversary, seated alone at the prosecutor’s table, was in the foulest of moods as he was forced to contemplate the political ramifications of the unthinkable: his failure to win a single conviction against black lawyers defending black men accused of the attempted murder of white police in Maury County, Tennessee.

The shock from the summer’s not-guilty verdicts had worn off by November, and Marshall sensed that the white people of Columbia were becoming angrier and more resentful of the fact that this Northern Negro was still in town, making a mockery of the Tennessee courts. He’d watched patiently as Bumpus stacked the deck in his own favor by excusing every potential black jury member in the Maury County pool (there were just three) through peremptory challenges that did not require him to show cause for dismissal. And Marshall had paid close attention to the desperation in Bumpus’s closing statement to the jury, when the prosecutor warned them that if they did not convict, law enforcement would break down and wives of jurymen would die at the hands of Negro assassins. None of it surprised Marshall. He was used to, and even welcomed, such tactics from his opponents because they often helped to establish solid grounds for appeals. But Marshall also noticed that the atmosphere around the Columbia courthouse was growing more volatile.

A political cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier now doing public relations work for the NAACP had been poking around the courthouse and had come to believe that the telephone wires were tapped and that the defense lawyers were in danger. Learning this, Marshall refused to discuss any case details or sleeping arrangements over the phones, and the PR representative reported back to Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, that the situation in the Columbia Court House is so grave that anything may happen at any time. White issued a memorandum to NAACP attorneys, demanding no telephone calls be put through to Columbia or even to Nashville [where Marshall was staying] unless and until Thurgood says that it is safe to do so. White noted that we are dealing with a very desperate crowd and want nothing to jeopardize the lives of anyone, particularly persons as close and as important to us as Thurgood and his three associates. White even contacted the U.S. attorney general’s office and warned that if anything happened to Marshall while he was in Tennessee, it would create a nation-wide situation of no mean proportions.

Marshall’s associates didn’t need Walter White to warn them of any danger they might be in. They were local Tennessee lawyers who had investigated enough lynchings in these parts to know that the death threats they received from the citizens of Columbia were to be taken seriously. Sitting to one side of Marshall at the table was a forty-seven-year-old poker-playing highbrow with a faint Caribbean accent named Zephaniah Alexander Looby, who came to Tennessee by way of the British West Indies. At fourteen years of age and living in Dominica, Looby found work as a cabin boy aboard a whaling ship, and two years later, in 1914, broke and bedraggled, he jumped ship in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with the dream of becoming a lawyer. He eventually received his degree from Columbia Law School in New York and taught economics at Fisk University in Nashville until the call of civil rights law beckoned and Marshall put him on the Columbia case.

To Marshall’s left was the lone white attorney on the case, the young, hotheaded Maurice Weaver, who reveled in the danger of standing up to white authority and racism; on more than one occasion throughout the Columbia Race Riot trials he had nearly come to blows with prosecutors. Marshall and Looby enjoyed having Weaver around, in part because the two black attorneys were inherently polite and gracious in court whereas Weaver was something of a lightning rod for white anger. Whenever prosecutors or witnesses referred to a black as that nigger, Weaver loudly interrupted with objections, insisting that the person be referred to as Mr. or Mrs. for the record. Bumpus seethed.

Weaver also endeared himself to Marshall because the Tennessee lawyer liked to drink, though at one point during the trial, his provocative nature had become not only distracting but dangerous, and Marshall was forced to intervene. Weaver’s teenage and very pregnant wife, Virginia, decided that she’d like to see her husband at work and asked to ride along with Looby’s associates and black reporters. Locals were speechless when the pregnant white girl hopped out of a car packed with Negroes and marched straight into court. Marshall, observing the commotion, pulled her aside and told her to take a Greyhound bus to court next time. You almost started another lynching here in the courthouse, he warned.

As the jury of twelve began filing back into the courtroom, Looby and Weaver searched their tired, sullen faces for a hint of the verdict. Marshall was on edge; he remembered how colleagues and friends had urged him not to return to Columbia. Over that terrible summer of 1946, he’d been running a constant fever while working in courtrooms that had no bathrooms or drinking fountains for blacks. The long hours, relentless travel, and Tennessee heat were taking their toll, but Marshall would not slow down. By July the lawyer’s body had finally wilted. Mid-case, he succumbed to exhaustion and a debilitating pneumonic virus that led to a long stint in a Harlem hospital, followed by weeks of doctor-ordered bed rest. Still, from his bed, and against everyone’s wishes, Marshall continued to lead late-night telephone strategy sessions with Looby and Weaver until he could no longer stay away—and no one was going to stop him from boarding a train to Nashville. The Columbia case, he said, is too important to mess up. And I, for one . . . am determined that it will not be messed up.

MARSHALL WAS IN New York on February 26, 1946, when a desperate call from Tennessee came into the NAACP offices, describing a full-blown race riot in Columbia. An emergency meeting was called and Marshall learned that the trouble began the previous morning when a black woman, Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, went into a Columbia appliance store with her nineteen-year-old son, James, to complain about being overcharged for shoddy repairs to a radio. After loudly proclaiming that she’d take the radio elsewhere, Gladys exited the store with her son. But twenty-eight-year-old radio repair apprentice Billy Fleming did not appreciate the threatening look he got from James on the way out.

What you stop back there for, boy, to get your teeth knocked out? Fleming asked, before racing over and punching James in the back of the head.

James’s boyish looks were deceiving. A welterweight on the U.S. Navy boxing team, he barely flinched and countered with several punches to Fleming’s face, sending him crashing through a plate-glass window at the front of the store.

Bleeding profusely from his leg, the army vet came up fighting, and other whites joined the melee, shouting, Kill the bastards! Kill every one of them! One man went after Gladys, slapping and kicking her to the ground and blacking her eye. A few minutes later police arrived and carted mother and son off to jail. After pleading guilty to public fighting and agreeing to pay a fine of fifty dollars each, the two were about to be released when Billy Fleming’s father convinced officials to charge both Gladys and James with the attempted murder of his son; the two were held by police in separate cells. As the news spread that James Stephenson had gotten the better of Billy Fleming and sent him wounded to the hospital, Maury County became galvanized. A mob began to gather around town and outside the jail, and by late afternoon the sheriff was hearing talk that a group of men were planning to spring the Stephenson niggers out of the jail and hang them.

Carloads of young, white workers from the phosphate and hosiery mills in nearby Culleoka (where the Flemings lived) began arriving at the square, and more volatile World War II veterans joined them. Rumors that rope had been purchased had reached the Bottom, and Julius Blair, a seventy-six-year-old black patriarch and owner of Blair’s Drug Store, had heard enough. He’d seen firsthand what white mobs in Columbia were capable of in recent years, around that courthouse down the block. He’d been there when they’d taken one man out of jail and lynched him back in ’27, and more recently, there was young Cordie Cheek. The community was still raw over Cordie’s killing. The nineteen-year-old had been falsely accused of assaulting the twelve-year-old sister of a white boy he had been fighting with. The boy paid his sister a dollar to tell police that Cordie had tried to rape her, but a grand jury refused to indict and Cordie was released and abducted that same day by county officials, who took him to a cedar tree and hanged him. Julius Blair was well aware that it was Magistrate C. Hayes Denton’s car that had driven Cordie to his death; yet, undeterred, Blair marched into Denton’s office and demanded that Gladys and James Stephenson be released. Let us have them, Squire, Blair told him. We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County.

Blair managed to convince the sheriff to release the Stephensons into his custody and arranged for them to be dropped off at his drugstore early that evening. By then, though, blacks in the Bottom had gone past being intimidated by the hooting and honking of armed whites circling the area in cars; they weren’t going to stand passively by this time while another Cordie Cheek lynching unfolded. More than a hundred men, many of them war veterans, took to the streets with guns of their own, determined to fight back at the first sight of a mob moving toward the Bottom. Armed and angry, they told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that they were ready if whites came down to the Bottom. We fought for freedom overseas, one told him, and we’ll fight for it here.

True to his word and hoping to avoid any more trouble, the sheriff released the Stephensons that evening, and Blair arranged for the two of them to be whisked out of town, blankets over their heads for their protection. Uptown, they are getting together for something, Blair told them.

The nearby white mobs meanwhile did not disperse, and blacks in the Bottom were growing more fearful as the night progressed. Drinking beer and circling in cars, whites fired randomly into Mink Slide, as they derisively referred to the Bottom. Blacks, drinking beer on rooftops, were also firing in response and by bad chance hit the cars of both a California tourist and a black undertaker. When half a dozen Columbia police eventually moved into Mink Slide, a crowd of whites followed behind. They were welcomed by shouts of Here they come! and Halt! and then, in the confusion, came a command, Fire! and shots were exploding from all directions. Four police were struck with buckshot before they retreated.

Reports of the skirmish roused whites around town. Columbia’s former fire chief headed toward Mink Slide with a half gallon of gasoline and the intent to burn them out, but he was shot in the leg by Negro snipers as he stole down an alley. With the arrival of state troopers and highway patrol reinforcements, the whites finally outnumbered the blacks and moved into Mink Slide, where they ransacked businesses until dawn, fired machine guns into stores, and rounded up everyone in sight. You black sons of bitches, one patrolman shouted, you had your-alls’ way last night, but we are going to have ours this morning.

Just after 6 a.m., gunfire from the street rained into Sol (son of Julius) Blair’s barbershop. Rooster Bill Pillow and Papa Lloyd Kennedy, hiding in the back, saw armed officers coming and were said to have fired a single shotgun blast before they were overpowered and taken into custody. They were stuffed with other blacks from the Bottom into overcrowded cells at the county jail and interrogated without counsel for days. Two prisoners were shot dead trying to escape.

Mary Morton had watched helplessly as state patrolmen barged into her family’s funeral home on East Eighth Street and arrested her husband. From the street she heard the sound of breaking glass and the building being ransacked. A short time later she saw the same officers, laughing and joking, return to the street. Once they were out of sight, Morton went inside to discover the parlor furniture broken and slashed, clothes torn to pieces, and the entire interior doused with embalming fluid. With horror, she laid eyes on a defaced casket. Photographed soon after, the image of that casket would be published in newspapers across the country and ultimately come to symbolize the Columbia riot of 1946. Across its lid, in large letters, KKK was crudely scrawled in chalk.

Mary Morton tried to pick up the phone, but patrolmen caught her, cursed her, and threatened to throw the phone out on the street. Police had declared war on the black citizens of Columbia, and the highway patrolmen, instead of trying to bring order to the town, had joined in with vigilante mobs. The Tennessee State Guard had cordoned off the area, but they did nothing to stop the destruction and violence in Mink Slide. The Maury County jail had become a deadly destination for Mary Morton’s husband and other leaders of the black community. Officials would soon shut down telephone service into and out of Mink Slide, but not before Mary Morton managed to make her call. After the police moved on, she phoned a friend in Nashville. She implored him to get word to the NAACP immediately.

Nine hundred miles north, in New York, a lanky lawyer in suspenders was called into a meeting. He grabbed his coffee and settled into a chair. He heard another all-too-familiar story of violence and cruelty in the South, and he knew that once again order would be restored, as always, with blacks’ blood running in the gutters. An editorial in the Columbia Daily Herald proclaimed that the situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. . . . The white people of the South . . . will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be. In Marshall’s early days at the NAACP, emergency meetings would sometimes end with the unfurling of the ill-omened black flag, alerting New Yorkers that yet another man had been lynched. The flag’s gloomy stain over the city usually meant that Marshall would be back on a train, alone, again riding toward trouble.

And nine hundred miles south, in Columbia, Tennessee, where the town’s blacks were holed up in their homes and jail cells, there rose whispers of relief: the lawyer was coming.

THE TWELVE white men on the jury took their seats in the box, and the foreman rose to announce the verdict against Rooster Bill Pillow for shooting and wounding a state highway patrolman. The courtroom was still.

Not guilty.

Marshall, Looby, and Weaver sat in quiet shock. In the last acquittals, Weaver had loudly slapped a defendant’s knee in excitement and leapt from his chair to shake hands with jurors who appeared to be just as stunned as everyone else in the courtroom. This makes me proud to be an American! he’d shouted. Marshall wanted no celebratory outbursts this time.

Papa Kennedy’s verdict was next. Marshall was expecting Kennedy would be going to jail, for unlike Pillow, Kennedy had been surly and impudent throughout the trial—at one point telling Bumpus to shut up in open court. But the jury rejected the charge of attempted murder and convicted Kennedy on a lesser count that enabled him to leave the courthouse free on bail.

Marshall and his lawyers rose from their seats, wanting nothing more than to leave town quickly. Because of the constant threats and concerns for his safety, Marshall had been staying in Nashville, almost fifty miles to the north, and driving back and forth each day with Looby and Weaver. Tagging along was reporter Harry Raymond, who’d been covering the trial for the Daily Worker, a New York newspaper published by the Communist Party of the USA. He described the moments after the verdict as tense, and he expected something serious, something of a violent nature, to happen. On his way to telegraph the verdict to his newspaper, Raymond noticed one agitated, heavyset spectator rushing out the doors and declaring that something must be done about the failure of the jury to convict.

Raymond knew the NAACP lawyers had been threatened with lynching, and had been told their bodies would wind up in Duck River, which they had to cross each day on the way to court. The white reporters covering the trial pleaded with Raymond to leave town with them, but he had a feeling the story of the Columbia Race Riot hadn’t ended with the verdicts, and he chose to ride back to Nashville with Marshall and the NAACP lawyers.

With their heads down, the lawyers humbly exited the courtroom. Gone was Marshall’s usual swagger. There were no pictures or proclamations on the courthouse steps. Marshall walked briskly. Looby tried to keep up with him as best he could on his bad leg; he’d spent months in a cast after being struck by an automobile and was still limping noticeably. Marshall waited impatiently as the lawyers, with Raymond tagging along, hopped into Looby’s car. They drove a few blocks to Mink Slide, where they picked up soft drinks and crackers at Julius Blair’s drugstore—the epicenter of the race riots nine months earlier. After some congratulatory handshakes, Blair urged them to get moving. Marshall, though, wanted to do some private celebrating.

Maury County was a dry county, but Marshall had become acquainted with the local bootlegger, so there would be just one stop to make before they headed north to Nashville. The sedan stole down a dirt road at just about eight o’clock in the evening. The bootlegger, however, had disappointing news. I just sold the last two bottles to the judge! he told Marshall. The four men headed for Nashville, empty-handed.

With Marshall at the wheel, Raymond beside him, and Looby, in part because of his bad leg, in the back with Weaver amid piles of law books and case files, the four men heaved a collective sigh of relief as they headed out of Columbia. They had seen the signs posted around town during the trials:

NIGGER READ AND RUN. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE. IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYHOW!

To Marshall, they recalled a message he had received mid-trial from Walter White: Take care of yourself and keep your feet in running order.

The sedan had just crossed a bridge over Duck River when they came upon a car parked in the middle of the road. Marshall honked the horn and waited, but the car did not move, so he drove around it and headed for Nashville. Inside the sedan it was quiet; unspoken went the fear that something was amiss. Then, piercing the silence, the sound of a siren screamed from behind.

Thurgood, Looby said. That siren. It’s a police car!

Is it following us? Marshall asked.

Yes. It’s coming after us fast.

You’d better stop the car, Thurgood, Weaver said.

Marshall turned his head and was troubled to see three cars following them. The first, carrying highway patrolmen, roared past the sedan and forced Marshall to jam on the brakes. Quickly, eight men, some in police uniforms and some in civilian clothes, converged on the sedan. Marshall saw that a few of them had their hands on their guns while others shone flashlights on the men inside. Reporter Harry Raymond kept his mouth shut, but he knew this wasn’t a routine police stop.

The lawyers and Raymond were ordered out of the car. They froze as one cop approached.

You men the lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?

Yes, I’m Thurgood Marshall. This is Maurice Weaver and this gentleman is Alexander Looby.

The cop looked them over. Drinking, eh?

I beg your pardon, Marshall replied.

I said you’ve been drinking. Celebrating the acquittal. Driving while intoxicated.

Weaver interjected that this stop was a civil rights violation and, furthermore, it was obvious none of them had been drinking.

Stay out of this, Weaver, the cop said. You’re a white man and have no business in this car anyway.

The police then asserted their right to search the car and Weaver demanded that they produce a warrant. Using flashlights, Marshall was able to read the John Doe warrant signed by a deputy sheriff, charging the lawyers with transporting whiskey in violation of county local option law.

The police search of the car turned up nothing, so they decided to search the lawyers.

You got a warrant to search us? Marshall asked.

No, the officer responded.

Well, the answer is no, Marshall said.

The police let the lawyers return to their vehicle, and this time Looby took the wheel.

You weren’t driving this car, were you? one cop asked Looby.

I’m not answering your question, Looby replied.

The cop then looked to Marshall, who said, I’m not answering your question, either.

Confused about what to do next, the police argued over who had been driving the car when it was stopped. That’s the one! The tall yaller nigger! one of them insisted with certainty, and the officers approached Marshall, who was asked to show his license.

The cop took one look. Get out, he said. Put your hands up.

Marshall was dumbfounded. What is it? he asked.

Drunken driving, the officer responded.

Drunken driving? You know I’m not intoxicated, Marshall said. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four hours!

Get in the car, one of them said.

With guns drawn and flashlights glaring, four men hustled Marshall into the backseat of a nonofficial sedan.

Keep driving, they shouted back to Looby and Weaver as they placed Marshall under arrest. With Marshall wedged into the backseat, the car sped away, back toward Columbia. As they picked up speed, the four law enforcement agents were quiet and all business. They drove into the darkness. Walter White had warned Marshall, as had Looby and Weaver, about these Tennessee men and their Master Race preachments. Marshall knew that the Ku Klux Klan in Columbia was deeply entrenched in the local police; he knew its members served as sheriffs and magistrates. He had read the NAACP reports. This wasn’t the Klan of cowardly hood, rather, it wears cap and visor, and shining badge. . . . It is the LAW. It arrests its stunned victims, unlisted.

Marshall had no idea where they were going. For years his dark humor had horrified young lawyers and assistants when he would go into great detail about what Southern police or the Klan did with uppity Negroes in the woods. Now Marshall was the uppity Negro, alone, and he wasn’t in a joking mood. Looking out the window of the sedan, he could see the cedar trees as the headlights flashed across them. It was under a cedar tree just down the road that hundreds of townspeople had gathered around young Cordie Cheek in his last living moments. They had watched and cheered as officials pulled down Cordie’s pants and castrated him before forcing him up a stepladder and hanging him. Pistols were passed around the crowd; they were fired until all the bullets were gone.

The car began to slow. The lawmen were quietly mumbling and pointing; then the driver turned left down a dirt road, toward the famous Duck River. Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads. He knew that the bodies of blacks—the victims of lynchings and random murders—had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.

The sedan was lumbering forward, bouncing down the dirt road, when Marshall caught his first glimpse of the men waiting down by the river. The headlights illuminated their stern faces. The car slowed, then stopped. Suddenly headlights appeared behind them. Had word spread about the lynching of the NAACP lawyer? Glimpsing the glare of the lights behind them, one of the policemen in Marshall’s car stormed out of the sedan to confront the driver of the second car. Marshall craned his neck to see; he recognized the limp.

It was Looby!

Instead of driving to Nashville as the police had ordered, Looby had spun a U-turn and followed the police sedan. As soon as it turned left off the main road, he knew Marshall was in trouble. He’d been teaching at Fisk University, just down the block from where the Maury County officials arrested Cordie Cheek, threw him into a sedan, and drove him to these same woods along Duck River. Well, they’ll have to kill me, too, Looby thought. He wasn’t going to leave Marshall to the devices of murderous law enforcement officers.

Once again the policemen ordered Looby to leave the scene. Waiting to be arrested, or worse, the slight, gimpy lawyer stood his ground; he refused to budge. He’d had these same police and town officials on the witness stand, and he’d wanted to question each one of them about the lynching of Cordie Cheek so that he could rightfully raise the issue of self-defense during the trial, but the judge had refused to allow it. Now Looby spoke his mind: he wasn’t leaving without Marshall, he said. Livid, the deputies and police conferred to the side. Whatever the plan had been, there were now too many witnesses, and there was sure to be another riot if things got out of hand with the lawyers. The police returned to the car and made a loop back up to the main road, with Marshall’s eyes lingering on the lynch party waiting by the river, while Looby, the man Marshall called a Rock of Gibraltar, followed close behind with Weaver and Raymond. This time the police drove Marshall back to the courthouse in Columbia, where he was pointed toward a magistrate’s office.

You go over there, one of the policemen said. We’ll be over.

No, you won’t. I’m going with you, Marshall replied, reminding the police that they had placed him under arrest. You’re not going to shoot me in the back while I’m ‘escaping.’ Let’s make this legal.

Smart-ass nigger, one said, and they shuffled Marshall up to the second floor of the courthouse, with Weaver trailing behind to serve as Marshall’s lawyer. Once there, they met Magistrate Jim Buck Pogue, a small, bald man not more than five feet tall.

What’s up? Pogue asked police.

We got this nigger for drunken driving, one officer told him.

Weaver was fuming. He accused the officers of being frame-up artists and demanded that Pogue examine Marshall.

Pogue looked Marshall up and down. He doesn’t look drunk to me, he observed.

I’m a teetotaler, Pogue said. I’ve never had a drink in my life. I can smell liquor a mile off. You want to take a chance?

Marshall stepped forward. Sure, he said, and leaning his tall, lanky frame down to Pogue till his mouth was just an inch from the magistrate’s nostrils, Marshall blew so hard he almost rocked this man.

Pogue took a deep whiff and exploded at the police. Hell, this man hasn’t had a drink. What are you talking about?

The arresting officers quickly filed out of the office.

What else is there? Marshall asked.

Pogue told him that there was nothing else and stated that those officers had come to the wrong man if they wanted to frame Marshall. He said he was the one magistrate in Columbia who had refused to sign warrants for the arrests of Negroes during the February trouble, and then he extended his hand to Marshall, saying, You’re free to go.

Marshall quickly left the courthouse for the second time that day. He noticed again that the streets were deserted. This time, however, he understood why. Everybody, Marshall realized, was down at Duck River waiting for the party.

He and Weaver hurried over to the Bottom, where Looby and Raymond were waiting at Sol Blair’s barbershop. They made sure Marshall was okay, but they also suspected Marshall wasn’t out of danger just yet. The officers, they figured, had probably been hoping to bring Marshall before Magistrate C. Hayes Denton, who surely would have locked Marshall up for the night. Then, in the pattern of all recent Maury County lynchings, it would only have been a matter of storming the jail with some rope and finishing the job.

Looby thought it likely the officers might not yet be ready to give up on their party. He came up with a plan of his own. Well, Thurgood, he said, we’ll put you in another car.

They decided to send a decoy driver out with Looby’s car, which would head toward Nashville, while Marshall and Looby in a different car sneaked out of town on back roads. Sure enough, Marshall watched members of the mob turn the corner and follow Looby’s car; then he and Looby drove off in another direction. He would later learn that Looby’s car was indeed pulled over, and when the pursuers discovered that Marshall wasn’t in it, they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.

In another car, Maurice Weaver made it back to Nashville that evening along with Harry Raymond, who immediately began typing his story for the Daily Worker. I am certain . . . a lynching was planned, he wrote. Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.

Walter White was convinced that had Looby obeyed police orders and continued driving to Nashville on that November night in 1946, Marshall would never have been seen again.

Safely back in Nashville and his heart still pounding, Marshall made a late-night phone call to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to tell him what had happened.

Drunken driving? Clark asked.

Yes.

Clark paused. He had come to know Marshall well since being appointed attorney general in 1945 by President Truman, and he had just one question for the man who would one day replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Well, Clark asked, were you drunk?

No, Marshall asserted, but exactly five minutes after I hang up this phone I’m going to be drunk!

2 SUGAR HILL

NAACP attorney Franklin Williams and blinded World War II veteran Isaac Woodard went on a nationwide speaking tour to raise money and awareness of the brutality Woodard suffered at the hands of law enforcement agents in the South. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Franklin Williams Papers)

NIGGER BOY, WHAT are you doing here?"

Marshall had been standing under the sweltering sun on the far end of the platform. He had stomach pangs from hunger and he tried to make himself look small, but the white man had come straight toward him, eyes cold and firm, the gun on his hip in plain sight.

Waiting for the train, Marshall told him.

The man eyed him up and down, suspicious of the suit.

There’s only one more train comes through here, the man told him, and that’s the four o’clock—you’d better be on it because the sun is never going down on a live nigger in this town.

His appetite gone, Marshall’s eyes followed the man as he turned away. So I wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket . . . and caught the next train out of there, the lawyer recalled.

One trip bled into another, and he never felt safe until he was riding the rails north again: sitting with a glass of bourbon in his hand, waiting for the porter to bring him a good cut of meat. Outside the parlor car window, the whitewashed shacks eventually gave way to factories and highways and row houses with white marble steps . . . until he finally stepped off the train in the entirely different world of New York. Pennsylvania Station, with its colossal pink granite columns and glass and steel train sheds, was one of the largest public spaces in the world, its grandeur awing the millions of travelers and commuters who daily passed through it. One entered the city like a god, architectural historian Vincent Scully noted. Yet the anonymity of strolling across the breathtaking ten-story vaulted concourse like any other man wearing a fedora and hauling his briefcase and luggage suited Marshall just fine. Standing out in a crowd on a train platform was something Marshall was happy to leave behind him in the South.

From Penn Station, Marshall hailed a DeSoto Sky View taxi and headed up the west side of Manhattan to his Harlem apartment. Though the Great Depression had put an end to the Harlem Renaissance, the concentration of blacks in the fifty-by-eight-block area created a dazzling energy and culture that continued to thrive in Harlem in the postwar 1940s; it was still the Negro capital of America. Uniformed black soldiers on leave from World War II swarmed the uptown streets, flocking to popular clubs like the Savoy Ballroom at night and bars like the Brown Bomber during the day. Past the Victoria and Apollo theaters on 125th Street, Marshall crossed over tracks laid on cobblestone, where trolley cars encouraged commuters to Ride the Surface Way.

Thurgood and his wife, Buster, in their twenties, childless, and already married for seven years, had come to New York in the fall of 1936. Like so many blacks who had migrated from the South, the young couple had come to Harlem, but not to escape Jim Crow. Thurgood had been offered a job with the NAACP, where he’d share a Manhattan office with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston. The money wasn’t good. Houston himself was living at the YMCA in Harlem, and he pulled in nearly twice Thurgood’s two-hundred-dollar salary each month. The Marshalls had packed their bags in Baltimore and headed north to stay with Thurgood’s aunt Medi and uncle Boots (Denmedia and Clarence Dodson) on Lenox Avenue—in the heart of Harlem in the waning moments of the Renaissance. It was the place to be.

FATS WALLER PARKED on a piano bench for the night in a Harlem flat, fedora perched on his head and a flask within easy reach. He popped and rolled his eyes and wiggled his brows between verses as the dancers—maids, elevator operators, and other working-class blacks who lived uptown—brushed against him, fighting for space to unwind. Men were patted down on entry, but Fats had to remind some of them to behave, mid-song, until the words were said so often they crept into his lyrics: Put that gun away! Lights dimmed with colored bulbs hung over the dance floor, a space cleared of furniture except for a table and chairs to accommodate a five-hour poker game. Bourbon and gin flowed. The floors shook, and from the kitchen the sweet smell of yardbirds (chicken) and grits wafted in the air. All night long piercing laughter and shouts rose above Fats’s voice until the lights continued to dim and he was singing and playing swing and stride piano in darkness.

A lively young couple, Thurgood and Buster reveled in the Harlem nightlife. They had looked for a place of their own but quickly realized they were going to have to compromise. With a total population more than double what it is today, the buildings and tenements uptown were overflowing with roomers: residents who rented sleeping space in apartments where living and dining rooms were converted into bedrooms at night. To help pay the rent, many tenants held rent parties; they would simply throw up a sign with the date and their address, and for a dollar or so guests could gain entry.

We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan

Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!

The tradition of the rent party, which thrived during the Harlem Renaissance, continued into the forties out of economic necessity. Because famous clubs like Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club did not allow black customers, and Small’s Paradise, though not segregated, had high door fees that ensured mostly upscale white audiences, much of the great live music at the time was not accessible to blacks. This spurred musicians like Waller and Louis Armstrong to play at rent parties—not just for the extra cash but also for the joy of performing at lively parties with enthusiastic black crowds.

After a few weeks with Marshall’s relatives, the young couple found a place of their own on 149th Street. It was small and cramped, but they weren’t sharing it with people twice their age, and with Charlie Houston holed up at the YMCA, neither Buster nor Thurgood was complaining, even though money would be tighter. To make ends meet, Buster realized she’d have to contribute. Light-skinned, with wavy hair and soft brown eyes, she’d been a student at the University of Pennsylvania when she met Thurgood at a restaurant in Washington. Marshall claimed it was love at first sight, but eighteen-year-old Vivian Burey disagreed, claiming that the Lincoln University student and self-avowed ladies’ man was so busy arguing and debating with everybody at the table that [he] didn’t even give me a second glance. The daughter of a Philadelphia caterer, Vivian had an ample chest that had earned her the nickname Buster in her teen years—a nickname that she maintained throughout her life. She had pluck and a radiant smile, and her intelligence and outgoing personality helped her to acclimate to New York as easily as her husband did.

Soon after they arrived in New York, Buster became involved with the Harlem cooperative grocery markets that had been sprouting up after the Great Depression to develop black economic power. Her work with the co-op helped lower the couple’s food bills each week and added a few extra dollars to their cash flow. Despite